Green, but Still Feeling Guilty

JOSH DORFMAN, author of “The Lazy Environmentalist: Your Guide to Easy, Stylish, Green Living,” could not be accused of failing to live green.

He and his partner, Stephanie Holzen, a former stuntwoman, and their 5-month-old son, Shep, recently moved to a rental in a Victorian house in Crested Butte, Colo., where, he happily notes, the renovated stairway is made from reclaimed barn wood. Their furniture is also made from recycled wood and steel; in fact, the coffee table is wood that was reclaimed twice, having been salvaged from reclaimed wood that was being made into flooring.

Mr. Dorfman, 38, and Ms. Holzen, 35, use natural cleaning products, and are “constantly” drinking out of their Brita pitcher, so there is no need for disposable water bottles. All their personal-care products are organic, and Mr. Dorfman’s clothes are made from organic cotton and recycled materials — including his Nau blazer, which, he said, is made from recycled soda bottles.

But they have one great greenie flaw: they are addicted to disposable diapers.

“We tried cloth and think it’s totally unrealistic,” Mr. Dorfman said. Like the rest of America, he said, they have gravitated toward disposable diapers “and that’s really environmentally sinful. It’s plastic derived from petroleum. You use them once and then they get tossed in a landfill. It’s a terribly inefficient use of natural resources.

“Not only do I feel guilt, I feel hypocritical. But it’s the most functional diapers we’ve found. They keep my son dry. They don’t irritate his skin. They don’t clump up and get really heavy. They happen to work the best, and that’s annoying.”

Photo

Josh Dorfman, top, who writes about “green living,” diapers his son, Shep, in disposables.Credit
Michael Brands for The New York Times

The couple have found a way to lessen their pain — though it may be tricky for those without the lightning reflexes of a stuntwoman-turned-mom.

“Because we feel guilty about using disposable diapers, we’ve begun practicing ‘elimination communication,’ ” Mr. Dorfman explained in an e-mail. “What this means is that we pay close attention to Shep to determine when he’s about to pee or poop and then race to the shower so that he doesn’t soil his diaper so we can use it longer. We’ve actually gotten pretty good at reading the signs.”

Living in an environmentally responsible way, for the truly observant greenie, can be difficult. Certainly it is sensible to take the position, as do Mr. Dorfman and several others interviewed, that guilt is neither healthy, nor a motivation for long-term change. But when one is acutely concerned about doing the right thing, it can be difficult not to feel guilty on occasion.

Those who skim the surface of the earth’s crust in their needlessly huge fossil-fuel vehicles, tossing their foam coffee cups out the window, may never give such matters a second thought, focused as they are on getting to the mini-mart and saying to the clerk, “A six-pack of your finest spring water, my good fellow. And would you mind triple bagging it?” But for those who are concerned about green, life is fraught.

Finally, a Use for Our Outdated

Baby Seal Shrug

It is one of the ironies of being a professional environmentalist that your business often requires you to embrace what you prefer to shun. Such is the case with Danny Seo, 33, who likes to tell people he was born on Earth Day, has written seven books on eco-living “from an aesthetic point of view” and frequently organizes magazine shoots about green living. He is writing a book, “Upcycling,” about reusing objects that might otherwise be thrown away.

Might he give us an example?

“A Patagonia jacket you might have worn out and you figure out a way to zipper them together,” Mr. Seo said. “It makes the chicest, most gorgeous Gore-Tex shower curtain. It will never mold or mildew. If you bought a Gore-Tex shower curtain, it would retail at $600.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Seo’s business has built-in conflicts with Mother Earth: From a carbon footprint point of view, one should live in the smallest house possible, but he has two houses in Bucks County, Pa., 20 minutes apart, although one is used solely for photo shoots — and, of course, he powers it down completely when it is not in use. He redecorates all the time, and probably it would be greenest to leave things as they are, but he is a decorator and likes things to look a certain way. And when he is in Los Angeles, he rents an S.U.V. to haul around rugs and props.

That doesn’t sound so bad — he needs to haul stuff.

“The problem is the shoot will be on Monday, but I will be in L.A. for meetings, which means for four days it’s me alone in this giant, empty S.U.V. in the city of the Prius,” Mr. Seo fretted. “Every celebrity has one, every agent.”

Why not swap cars?

“Go back to LAX and get a new car? I can’t spend that kind of time.”

Anything else he feels guilty about?

“I’m a very guilty person — I could go on for days,” Mr. Seo said. “I will tell you one other thing that is pretty major. For this new book, I have to make a lot of stuff, and a lot of the glues and spray paints that we are using are not so eco. The way I justify it is that I am putting together trash to make something new. One of the glues I’m using is so toxic, but it works great.

“I don’t know what’s in it, but if you ever use this glue indoors, it’s like huffing the newest hallucinogenic drug. I was gluing old china cups together to make tiered trays. The glue is so strong, once it is dry I can hold a tray by the handle of the teacup and nothing will fall apart, it’s amazing. I made like six of them and I had to lie down. But I can’t find another glue that works as well.”

Photo

Bob Staab, who recycles barn wood, prefers a powerboat.Credit
Joshua Bright for The New York Times

But How Do You Get the Guys to Remember to Open the Drain?

Eric Corey Freed, 40, is the founder of a San Francisco firm called organicArchitect and an author of “Green Your Home All-in-One for Dummies.” He is often called to consult on how to “green up” projects, and his advice, in these straitened times, is often admirably bold.

“They roll out the drawing for this 10,000-square-foot mansion and say, ‘What should we do, put on solar panels?’ ” Mr. Freed said. “I say, ‘Maybe you could lop off the second floor entirely.’ That’s the irony of living in our culture — we’re in a very adolescent phase between childhood exuberance and responsible adult housing, and in between we are going to make a lot of missteps.”

Does Mr. Freed — who said his wife, Laurie, is not a greenie and did not even recycle when they met — have any green guilt about his own lifestyle, which includes a 350-square-foot apartment in San Francisco and a 2,000-square-foot house in Palm Springs, Calif.?

“Nonstop, every minute, are you kidding?” he said. “Every time I set foot in the car. I drive a hybrid and I bought carbon offsets for it, so technically it’s carbon-neutral, but with carbon offsets you’re trading the carbon reduction of one company for the polluting practices of another. I have a 2-year-old child, a little girl — there’s a lot of guilt around the baby, because its stuff is horribly packaged, designed to be disposable, and there are times we have to do things I wouldn’t do for myself, such as disposable water bottles and these plastic placemats we use when we go to the restaurant. They’re great for germs, but disposable, awful things.”

The couple rejected cloth diapers.

“They’re messy and gross, and if you have a service and calculate the laundry and bleaching and chemicals to clean them, it doesn’t work out,” Mr. Freed said.

His greatest green angst comes from the knowledge that some 25 to 30 percent of an average home’s clean water goes down the toilet. He has tried to change that in his own homes by installing low-flow dual-flush toilets, then reducing water use further by submerging a half-gallon soda bottle filled with pebbles or water in the tank.

What he would really like to do, if only his wife would agree, is install some of the new composting toilets, which he says are not smelly and can look very smart. Another option is a toilet-top sink, like the SinkPositive, which he has in his office.

“When you flush, instead of the toilet filling up with fresh water, you wash your hands with water that is going to fill up the tank,” he said. “It looks like a tiny shallow sink with a small faucet, but it is in the shape of the rectangular tank. ”

You’re washing your hands on the top of the toilet?

“Now that I hear myself say it out loud, it sounds gross, but it’s not,” he said. “It’s also not that comfortable, because you have to kind of hunch over the toilet. In the office it made a lot of sense, but there’s no way Laurie would have allowed me to install it in the house.”

Mr. Freed has also cut water use by installing ultra-low-flow shower heads.

It was a surprise then to learn a few days later from the photographer who went to Mr. Freed’s house in Palm Springs that it has a pool — something he had never mentioned.

“You’re going crazy over wasting clean water in the toilet,” it was pointed out to him in a follow-up conversation. “How can you justify having a pool?”

Photo

Jeffrey Hollender, who makes nontoxic household products, says he can’t swear off new gadgets.Credit
Caleb Kenna for The New York Times

“I don’t justify it,” Mr. Freed said. “It’s why I try to save as much water as I can.”

Couldn’t he simply not use the pool?

“Yeah, we could,” he said. “I don’t think the environmental movement should be about living in a cabin without electricity or running water — it isn’t a back-to-earth movement, it’s about redesigning everything, about being more sustainable.”

“The pool doesn’t use a lot of resources the way we have it,” he added. “We don’t heat it. The motor runs at off-peak times. We have a cover to prevent evaporation. If you look at our water use, most of the water is going down the toilet or shower.”

But he lives in a desert — if he is concerned about water, why have a pool at all?

“You could argue, why even live in a desert?” Mr. Freed said. “I think it’s emblematic of the bigger system that we are designing things that are unsustainable.”

“It was next door to my mother-in-law. We only had a handful of choices.”

Makes Cleaning the Litter Box

The Preferred Chore

For no-frills environmental commitment, one cannot overlook Vermont. It is there that one will find Peter King, who runs Vermont Tiny Houses, a workshop on building houses of 240 square feet or less. Mr. King, 51, has been off the grid for 28 years, he said: he lives in a geodesic dome on 10 acres in Enosburg Falls, grows a good deal of his food, heats with wood. When asked what he feels guilty about, he didn’t hesitate.

“Plywood,” he said.

What’s wrong with plywood?

“It’s the glue they use,” he answered. “And it’s a matter of perspective — it depends how you use industrial mass production. When you buy a piece of plywood, you are buying potentially bad logging practices: plantation forestry where a whole area is clear cut and then replanted to look like a shopping mall. Whereas I can get local lumber from a sawmill. I suppose the environmental way would be to use tongue-in-groove lumber. But plywood is stronger, it’s faster, it’s cheaper — all of which count for most people. I would rather use plywood in a house, and get somebody’s ecological footprint down, than use the proper lumber if they can’t afford it.”

If Mr. King is a believer in tiny houses, why doesn’t he live in one?

“I want to, but I’ve got this dome around my neck,” he said. “It’s unfinished. It’s hard to heat. It’s a broken home. It was the home of my daughter and her mom, and they left. I don’t need the thing. They left in ’95. I’ve been here 15 years.”

Oh dear.

“My best friends are the woodchuck and the porcupine and the raccoon, not because I like them, but because I know what they’re capable of,” Mr. King said. “They’ll lie, cheat and steal. I have not given up on womankind. Tarzan is looking for his Jane.”

The ladies tend to care about plumbing. How’s he fixed for that?

He has a two-chamber concrete composting toilet, Mr. King said, but after reading “The Humanure Handbook,” he has learned there is a better way to go.

“A sawdust toilet is a five-gallon bucket with a toilet seat on top, and when it’s full you empty it into your compost pile,” he said. “The beautiful thing is you can have this toilet anywhere in your house and it doesn’t smell.”

Photo

Eric Corey Freed, a green architect, enjoys the pool with his wife, Laurie, and their daughter, Grayson.Credit
Ann Summa for The New York Times

A Cornucopia of Environmental Aggravation

Bob Staab, 53, president of After the Barn, a company in Goshen, N.Y., that recycles barn wood into furniture, said: “My biggest waste would be burning fuel on my boat, a 34-foot Regal. I keep it on Long Island. My girlfriend and I were talking about a sailboat, I swear to God, but I can get to Block Island in four hours — sailing, it would take all day. Maybe one day we’ll go that route, but right now I really am enjoying the power. My only other vice is drinking beer, but I recycle the cans.”

Jeffrey Hollender, 55, founder of Seventh Generation, a company that makes and sells nontoxic household products, says: “I buy too much stuff.” Mr. Hollender lives with his wife and three children in a 5,000-square-foot house in Charlotte, Vt. “A friend of mine challenged me to go for 30 days without buying anything new. I said, ‘That’s a great challenge, I’ll take you on. But I’m going to start next month, because the new MacBook Air is coming out.’ Then next month, for the iPhone, and I realized I just endlessly put off making the commitment because consumption had become such a part of my life.”

Frank Sliney, 75, former marine and chief executive of the 25-year-old Franmar Chemical (motto: “solutions from soybeans”), in Bloomington, Ill., which originally manufactured nontoxic soy-based cleaning products for industrial workers and has now expanded into green cleaning products for home use, replies: “My house is 4,800 square feet. I’m a rich guy. We lived in a little apartment, I worked for 20-plus years building this company. I drive a Lexus 460. I worked like hell all my life and paid my bills and never was on public aid.”

But isn’t your house too big for two people?

“Right,” he answered. “Why don’t we go out and bring in a family of 12 and adopt them? There are those who would prefer to plow golf courses under because of the water and chemicals they use. There’s no end to it. On a daily basis, I do more to save the earth than 10 people — I replace 32 tanker cars of mineral spirit with one tanker of soy. The soy will biodegrade in 28 days, the mineral spirits will go on a long time.”

Oops, Sorry, We Appear to Have Put

Mr. Sliney in the Wrong Section

“People who say, ‘We could grow our own fuel?’ that is really silly,” Mr. Sliney continues. “Call the American Soy Bean Board — you know how many gallons of fuel they’ll tell you you can get out of an acre of land? Three or four gallons per bushel per year. How many gallons of gasoline do we use in a day? Twenty-two million.”

Make That the Wrong Story

Mr. Sliney: “You know what I think? If you wake up in the morning and your biggest concern is trash cans or what kind of window sprays you’re using, you are having it good. There are people who wake up and their biggest concern is getting fed.”

Slip an Elephant a Slice of Salami and You’ll Ruin the Entire Line

The environment biz is fickle. Mike Flancman, a 40-year-old Canadian living in Thailand, worked as a young man in the bottled-water industry in Vancouver. Bottled water, he said with a somewhat melancholy air, was held “in a different light, almost as a savior to the population.” Next thing you know, disposable plastic bottles are the bad guys.

But Mr. Flancman, now married with two young children, is an enterprising fellow, and so he came up with Poo Poo Paper, a “100 percent recycled and odorless product” made from exactly what the name suggests. Elephants were the original source, but the business has since expanded to other non-meat-eating animals.

Living green, he said, comes more naturally in Thailand. There is no official recycling program where he lives, in Chiang Mai in the north, but garbage is sorted, wastepaper product is sold. His household of seven, which includes a nanny, housekeeper and mother-in-law, shares a 2,500-square-foot house. He does feel guilty about his air-conditioning use, but for six months of the year it’s over 90 degrees.

He has a 3-year-old and a 7-month-old. What kind of diapers does he use?

“Right,” Mr. Flancman said, in the tone of one whose hand has been caught in a jar of high-fructose chocolate chip cookies. “We don’t use cloth diapers, we use disposable diapers. So yes, I’m guilty about that. The first kid we had, we were boasting to my parents we were going to go cloth. My parents rolled their eyes and were, like, ‘Call us in six months.’ It lasted about two days. We never did do an impact study of water usage for cleaning versus disposable diapers, but babies use a lot of diapers. I need to figure out how to make diapers out of Poo Poo Paper.”

Diapers seem to be a stumbling block for everyone.

“Yeah,” Mr. Flancman said. “If I could only get my kids to eat grass, then we’d have a solution.”

Correction: October 7, 2010

An article last Thursday about environmentalists and their guilt over “ungreen" habits misstated the daily gasoline consumption in the United States. It is about 378 million gallons, according to the United States Energy Information Administration, not 22 million gallons.